President Santiago Peña indicated that he asked his Brazilian counterpart, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to seal the trade agreement between the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) and the European Union (EU). Negotiations remain stalled, and a meeting between the two blocs at the level of chief negotiators is planned for October to resolve the conflict.
The head of state argued that if our country assumes the pro tempore presidency of the economic block on December 6, it aims to establish other negotiations, for example, with Singapore or the United Arab Emirates.
“Brazil will transfer the presidency to Paraguay. After 25 years of negotiations, I believe we have reached the moment where we have to make decisions, Life is made of decisions. “I told President Lula to close the negotiations because if he doesn’t close, I won’t continue next semester,” he said at a press conference at the López Palace.
The negotiations ended in 2019, and the rest of the process was blocked because the EU proposed an addendum that included environmental guarantees as a condition for signing the final document, in which Mercosur consists of the states parties Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela have their counterproposals.
“I will dedicate the next semester to closing agreements with other regions of the world, such as Singapore or the United Arab Emirates. Paraguay has a strong vocation for integration; we are the most open country in Latin America, but this trade agreement is no longer a technical discussion but a political decision. It is not on the side of Mercosur, but on the side of the European Union,” he said.
